Highland Resistance , livre ebook

Title Page

HIGHLAND RESISTANCE

The radical tradition in the
Scottish North





Iain Fraser Grigor



Publisher Information

Copyright © Iain Fraser Grigor 2011

Published in 2010 by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

The right of Iain Fraser Grigor to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.


Synopsis

Highland Resistance takes as its subject the record of land-centred (and by implication culture- and nationality- centred) conflict in the Highlands of Scotland during the two and a half centuries since the Jacobite rising of 1745.
The book tells the story of anti-landlord agitation and direct-action land-raiding from the great sheep-drives in Sutherland at the end of the eighteenth century, on through the anti-eviction resistance that characterised the worst years of the notorious Clearances, and on again by way of the huge crofters’ agitation of the 1880s to continuing inter-war raiding and reform and the last great land-grab at Knoydart in the 1940s.
By setting this record in its context Highland Resistance shows its continuing political and cultural importance to our own times, as Scotland and her reborn parliament enter a new century and a new millennium.
The principal arguments of Highland Resistance are that there is a long and deep anti-landlord tradition in the Highlands; that this tradition has been under-pinned with an identity that can justly be identified as one of agrarian and cultural radicalism and nationalism; and that this tradition in one form or another lives on today, with a sharp and controversial resonance for the Highlands, and Scotland, of tomorrow.


Preface

“My people have been on this land for centuries. It is our land, and we mean to have our land”.

THE SUBJECT of this book is the record of opposition to landlordism - and the political and cultural overtones associated with that opposition - which characterises so much of the last two hundred and fifty years of Scottish Highland history.
This record is put in a modern context. The first chapter of the book considers landlord-centred disputes from the 1970s and 1980s while the final chapter examines some similar disputes from the 1990s. The intervening chapters concern themselves broadly with the story of anti-landlordism from the aftermath of the final Jacobite rising to the Knoydart land-raid in 1948.
This record is discontinuous and the focus on it, of the text, is therefore discontinuous too. But the effort is made, so far as is possible, to put those people involved in the anti-landlord tradition at the centre of their own history. This is not a point of view which would have recommended itself to all writers on Scottish affairs in earlier times.
As early as the 1730s, with the ink scarcely dry on the Treaty of Union, George Buchanan’s Latin histories of Scotland were alleged as unfit to be ‘put in the hands of our Scotch youth while at school, now there is an Union between the two Kingdoms, for fear of awakening that Old National Grudge, that should now be sopited [suppressed as discreditable] and industriously forgotten’.
In the second half of the same century the government’s censors extended this animosity to the theatre. The Lord Chamberlain’s office refused a licence for the performance of Duval’s Prince Charles Stuart, for instance, and granted permission only to plays which portrayed the Scots as quaint pastoralists or comic characters, and which ridiculed Scottish manners, character and speech.
And by the middle of the following century, with the Knoydart Clearances satisfactorily completed, the Times could assert that ‘Scotland is a country manifestly in want of a grievance. She labours under the weariness of attained wishes and the curse of granted prayers. Good fortune has joined her inseperably to the richest and most enterprising nation of modern times. Never was a territory north of Latitude 55 Degrees so favoured before’.
An echo of these sentiments is still found with reference to the modern Highlands. Consider a humorous item in the Daily Telegraph Peter Simple column from the autumn of 1981.
‘Clackies, as these small, tough unusually ferocious dogs are called in Scotland, tend to bight anyone they can get at on sight. They were formerly used by landlords’ agents to evict crofters in the West Highlands. A couple of Clackies down the chimney would soon have the crofters and their families outside and running for their lives’.
This item was judged so excessively funny that, with admirable economy of effort, it was reprinted fifteen months later in the same column: ‘In the days of the Highland clearances, they were used by landlords’ agents for evicting obstinate crofters. A couple of Clackies down the chimney had the wretches out in seconds, running for their lives in the direction of the nearest port where they might hope to get a boat for Nova Scotia’.
This same sort of pertinaciously generous humour was detectable at the Isle of Eigg “Games” in 1984. The festivities commenced the evening prior to the Games themselves with a cricket-match (for which the proper gear and costume was plentifully supplied) on that island beach where once the Norsemen hauled their longships for easy respite from the Minch, and across which at dusk cries rang in tones appropriate to such spirit as these Games, in such a location, may be thought to represent.
The following morning, things got under way with a suitable seriousness.
“The McVaugh family had flown in from Philadelphia despite imminent business meetings in Tokyo and Paris. Distant German cousin Axel von Schellenberg had arrived that morning from Frankfurt, chartered a helicopter at Glasgow airport and landed on the croquet lawn. The Clanranalds (led by Ranald MacDonald, Chief of Clanranald and Hereditary Chief of the Western Isles) wore kilts during the windsurfing. The Great Eigg Campaign re-enacted the bloody struggles between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites. Barbour jackets and wine-bottles littered the verandah. Dimly I could see a figure under an enormous white pith helmet, standing in a jeep which proudly bore the Union Jack flag’.
Or consider the opinions attributed to an interviewee by Vogue magazine in the same recent period, and happily published without apparent thought given to the appropriate race-relations legislation. According to Vogue, the traditional [sic] west-Highlander was ‘sloppy and dirty. They lie. They are fantasists with a babbling loquacity and an inability to look people in the eye’.
Or again, as another observer of this ‘traditional’ Highland scene in 1990 counselled in a local newspaper its indigent readers: ‘Local people do not want to work. They are unreliable. It is outsiders who achieve things here, not your Highlanders and Islanders. Be less anti-English, without us you would have drifted off into the Atlantic by now’.

And yet, and yet: the record of popular struggle, of popular aspiration to some sort of cultural and national integrity, will not lie down, will not be written, or humoured, or patronised, out of its own history. Many Highland writers have born witness in recent years, and in a very direct way, to this tradition of struggle.
The poet and cultural-historian Derick Thomson is one of those.
‘There was a small inner harbour behind my grandfather’s house on which the Established Church was built. It was here that the Rev. Donald MacCallum, the famous Land Leaguer, preached to his small flock, and my grandfather acted as precentor, though he never committed himself sufficiently to join the Church. He and MacCallum were good friends. MacCallum had a large glebe and ran it as a farm with the help of his brother Dughall. Later this glebe was raided and the village of Keose Glebe built on it. One of the raiders was my uncle Willie, and my grandfather must have derived real satisfaction from seeing his youngest son staking his claim to Keose land that had been denied himself so many years before’.
The folklorist Calum MacLean wrote of his meeting with a former anti-landlord activist from Sutherland.
‘Hector Sutherland is one of the few surviving Gaelic speakers in the district and a most intelligent and discerning old gentleman. In his younger and more active days he was prominent during the time of the crofter and Land League agitation’.
James Shaw Grant, for many years editor of the Stornoway Gazette, also recalled a similar meeting.
‘I remember as a young university student meeting one of the leaders of the Sutherland crofters of that era. Joseph MacLeod from Kildonan was a very old man by that time, but still active and full of fun. He looked like an Old Testament patriarch. My uncle spoke of him almost with reverence because of his standing in the north during the Crofters’ War. His technique was to go to a village, call a meeting, and deliver an address. He could then send an account of the meeting to the local press, reporting his speech in full. Other nearby villages, not wanting to be undone, would invite him to speak to them, and the snowball - perhaps I should say fireball - of land-reform was rolling through the district’.
Many others, in the closing decades of the 20th